why she’d found so little evidence of Corbin’s personal life in his apartment; it was all in his storage unit. Detective James had said that she’d be at the apartment in about an hour. Kate decided she had time to quickly check the basement and see what was down there. As soon as the idea entered her head, she knew she had to do it. It was a compulsion she was familiar with: if she didn’t look, then there was something terrible in the storage unit. She needed to look to make that terrible thing go away. And what was that terrible thing? The halved remains of endless murdered girls?
Kate tapped her fingertips together, dropping the key. It hit the slate floor with a snapping sound.
She picked it up and unlocked the kitchen door. Mrs. Valentine had told her, when she’d first given Kate the tour of the apartment, that the door in the kitchen led to the basement. Kate swung the door open, then found the switch, and a dim yellow light flooded the narrow, steep stairwell. Testing first to make sure that the door wouldn’t swing closed behind her of its own accord, Kate took the stairs down the three levels, the air cooling as she descended. At the bottom of the stairwell was an unlocked door. She pushed through and into the basement. She was expecting dim lighting and damp walls, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a wide, uncluttered, well-lit space. The floor was spotless poured concrete, and the finished walls were painted an industrial gray. Along one wall was a row of water heaters, and opposite them was a series of wooden doors constructed from particleboard. The doors all had stenciled letters on them and were padlocked. Storage units. Kate found the door marked 3D and tried the key. It slid into the padlock. Kate turned it and the lock snapped open.
This is it, Kate thought, her mind careening down its path of atrocities. She touched her upper lip with a dry tongue.
She swung the door open on its well-oiled hinges. It was dark inside but not so dark that she couldn’t see what was in front of her. There wasn’t a shrine to Audrey, splattered in blood. There wasn’t a corpse, or even a pool of blood. There were stacked boxes, plastic crates of sporting equipment and CDs. Kate stepped into the space, let her eyes adjust. A barbecue with a bubbled metal lid gave the space the smell of dusty charcoal. Stacked along one wall were half a dozen cheaply framed posters. She flipped through them. One was a crude picture she recognized as an album cover for a band called Ween. It was a photograph of a woman’s torso. She was wearing a plastic belt with the band’s logo, and a shirt that just barely covered her breasts. Kate stared at it, transfixed but not knowing why. The other posters were primarily of Italian sports cars, the types of posters that would seem pretty cheesy even on the walls of a university dorm room. There was also a poster for Fight Club, and a poster that listed the Twelve Reasons Beer Is Better Than a Woman.
Kate opened the nearest box. It was filled with comic books in plastic sleeves. She pulled one out—The Fantastic Four—and put it back. The rest of the boxes contained comic books, as well, all preserved in plastic sleeves. One box also contained a stack of sports car magazines, and hidden within them, a well-thumbed issue of Penthouse. Kate had a moment of guilt, prying through Corbin’s things. She thought of her own closet in her flat, the box that contained all her old sketchbooks, including one that was dedicated to drawings of boy bands and unicorns. She hoped he wasn’t looking through those. Then again, Kate wasn’t looking just to satisfy a prurient interest; she was looking for evidence. And suddenly, having that thought, she felt ridiculous. The police would be here soon, also looking for evidence, and they actually knew what they were doing. And there was nothing here in the storage unit to see. It was just items that Corbin wasn’t quite ready to throw out yet. Everyone’s storage unit looked like that.
She left the unit and swung the door shut behind her, and felt a splinter from the cheap wood slide into her thumb. She immediately put her thumb in her mouth, then took a look. The dark splinter was visible